Building energy efficient servers

At Jump we really like energy efficient servers. We try to encourage our customers to choose power-friendly hardware, so much so that in 2008 we changed our pricing scheme to do away with a per U or per server charge, and charged purely based upon power usage (in VA, metered at idle).

Always on the lookout for well featured power friendly hardware, my current favourite picks are offerings from Supermicro – one can mix and match components so that hot swap drive bays are available even on very small systems, and the IPKVMS (Remote over IP Keyboard Video Mouse and Storage) feature only costs around an extra £15, compared to several hundred pounds from some vendors, and Intel NICs save frustrations with operating systems which don’t include binary firmware blobs in their default installers.

With criteria of IPKVMS, sandy bridge, hot swap drive bays, and 80plus gold or better PSU, the following options are all interesting.

Jump isn’t generally in the business of hardware building or sales, although we occasionally do do this for customers, so I’ve chosen to link to and give prices from http://www.lambda-tek.com , who we have no affiliation with, and the prices are just a snapshot as of 2012-03-02, but they offer mostly the best prices I’ve seen, and are able and happy to supply Supermicro kit without opening a trade account with them. Where they’re more than a few pounds more expensive than other suppliers for a given component I’ve mentioned it.

A build will consist of a chassis, motherboard, CPU, heatsink, RAM, and HDDs. I’ve not considered HDDs here, and I’ve only considered the X9SCL+-F motherboard, which features IPKVMS and two traditional Intel GigE ports (so no need for particularly new kernels to support the NICs). I’ve only considered the smallest and largest reasonable RAM options, it is possible to use 32GB RAM, but the price is astronomical right now.